What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it; tap a face for their feed.
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6 December 2025
5 December 2025
From one piece The Problem With AI Life Coaching—and My Solution 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Living according to a genuine purpose brings sacrifice, stress and pain rather than constant enjoyment.Their words
Because when you believe in something, when you become obsessed with something, you sacrifice yourself to it. And that sacrifice actually feels like pain and stress and doubt. Not fun.
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Their words
ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me how great I was, reinforce any bad beliefs I might have had, and avoid saying anything uncomfortable.
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Likedrcmnd.app
DreddTheir words
But as a spectator, it’s fascinating, and in Dredd, it feels close enough to real to pack a punch.
4 December 2025
3 December 2025
From one piece Trillion Dollar Market Caps: Fairy Tale Pricing or Business Marvels? 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
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korrents.com
The revenue growth and margins needed to justify Nvidia’s and OpenAI’s late-2025 pricing are improbable.Their words
I think that the pathway that you would need (in terms of revenue growth and profitability) to justify Nvidia's and OpenAI's current pricing is improbable, but that is just my view
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Their words
the delusion comes from the reality that if you aggregated these breakeven revenues across companies, the market is not big enough to sustain all of them
+ 1 more
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Their words
If you are an investor who considers any highly priced company to be overvalued, I hope that this post leads you to reconsider.
2 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the WorldTheir words
Still, I’m glad that Rothman decided to spend a little bit (or actually a lot) of the money Fox was getting out of the X-Men and Ice Age series to make this extremely handsome, extremely rewatchable ballad to the high seas.
1 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Singer of TalesTheir words
That question is explored in another extraordinary book, Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales
From one piece Why Most Cryptocurrencies Won’t Accrue Value 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Decentralized finance mainly converts custodial risk into technical risk rather than eliminating risk altogether.Their words
While there is some utility value in DeFi, it basically lets users transform custodial risk into technical risk (e.g. bridge protocol hacks), which is not a free lunch.
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korrents.com
Bitcoin's roughly $2 trillion market capitalization is still early relative to its long-term adoption potential.Their words
In my view, Bitcoin at a ~$2 trillion market capitalization remains rather early.
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Their words
Utility protocols face heavy competition, and thus their value trends toward their marginal cost of operation.
From one piece get good 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Relying more and more on one's existing strengths eventually stops being a winning strategy.Their words
There comes a time when you have to realize that more of the same aspect of yourself isn't always a winning strategy.
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korrents.com
Americans tend to be aggressive yet thin-skinned, sure of their own rightness while doubting everyone else.Their words
Americans are mean, but fragile. Bullies, but babies. They are right, always, but also skeptical of every one else.
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korrents.com
Coaches who depend on clients paying them repeatedly avoid the corrections that might drive those clients away.Their words
American tennis coaches do not want to get fired. They want you to continue to pay them.
From one piece The Devil's Plan to Ruin the Next Generation 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.Their words
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
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korrents.com
The share of American teenagers who say that life often feels meaningless surged as Gen Z entered adolescence.Their words
But as soon as Gen Z entered the dataset, around 2013, meaninglessness surged.
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Their words
So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
K-Pop Demon HuntersTheir words
K-Pop Demon Hunters functions fabulously as an action-oriented animated musical, but what makes it rewatchable are the character interactions.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
ReederTheir words
I love RSS! Reeder has been installed on my devices for many years now and has become my primary RSS reader in 2024.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Sublime TextTheir words
After many years, Sublime Text remains one of my favourite code editors. I still often use it to edit huge files or to make heavy edits through its powerful find and replace feature.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Mac OSTheir words
Both OS have their flaws. macOS just works better for me and my workflow.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
SafariTheir words
I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
FirefoxTheir words
I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary
30 November 2025
29 November 2025
28 November 2025
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
LoveveryTheir words
Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Merlin SuitTheir words
Merlin Suit: I dunno what Merlin knows about babies but this sleeping suit is a MIRACLE.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
RadioooooTheir words
Not a podcast, but Radiooooo is a world map where you can click on countries and pick a decade to listen to popular music from that place and time. What will they think of next!
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
FrancieTheir words
Fancy in Brooklyn: Francie is my favorite restaurant in Brooklyn (actually, all of NYC). I also die for Celestine, where I got married!
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Pop PantheonTheir words
Here are some favorites I listen to consistently: Pop Pantheon (music)
From one piece The Importance of Bed Depth 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A deeper coffee bed reduces astringency by trapping long molecules on particle surfaces, not by pore-size filtration.Their words
the coffee bed would act on these molecules by filtering them out a bit like oxygen adsorbers keep oxygen in; it just provides a gigantic maze of free surface area for them to stick on, and hopefully the microscopic fluid velocity is gentle enough to not drag them along.
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Their words
the depth of a coffee bed, contrary to the width of the coffee bed, is a variable that impacts the flavor of the coffee being brewed significantly, and in a way that you cannot easily compensate for by changing other brew variables.
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korrents.com
Dripper diameter, with other brew variables held fixed, does not change extraction or taste — only batch size.Their words
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
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Usestheir ownrcmnd.app
Pulsar MiniTheir words
In other words, I still use exactly the same recipe that I developed for the Pulsar when I brew with the mini, I just brew with a dose smaller by a factor 0.6 (e.g., 15 grams instead of 25).
27 November 2025
From one piece On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Widespread AI-driven performance tuning agents will meaningfully reduce global energy waste.Their words
In future there will be AI performance agents that can be run on everything, helping to save the planet by reducing energy usage.
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korrents.com
Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.Their words
If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."
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korrents.com
AI agents trained on an expert's published work can only automate a small fraction of that expert's actual job.Their words
These would only automate about 15% of what I do as a performance engineer, and will go out of date if I'm not training it to follow industry changes.
26 November 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Mark Steel’s in TownTheir words
Every episode he goes to a small town in England and he does a comedy set in a local venue about the history of the town. And so he does very deep research... I love that sort of like hyperlocal, like comedy, that sort of British culture thing.
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Usesrcmnd.app
NetNewsWireTheir words
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
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Usestheir ownrcmnd.app
shot-scraperTheir words
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Iyoshi ColaTheir words
Iyoshi Cola. Craft colas are often disappointing, but this one was absolutely delicious. Wish I could get it in the States for less than $14 a can. (A)
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Likedrcmnd.app
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three)Their words
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
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Likedrcmnd.app
Tron: Ares soundtrackTheir words
Tron: Ares soundtrack. Better than the movie. (A-)
+ 2 more
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Fantastic FourTheir words
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Total RecallTheir words
Total Recall. First time! Maybe a little too Verhoeven/B-movie for me. (C+)
25 November 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Framework DesktopTheir words
It's an incredible machine, but in the day-to-day, I've actually found I barely notice the difference compared to a $500 mini PC from Beelink
From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I want to like emphasize that I think the value function is something like it's going to make RL more efficient and I think that makes a difference but I think that anything you can do with a value function you can do without just more slowly.
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Their words
The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people.
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korrents.com
There is no human analogue to pre-training — neither childhood nor evolution is the same thing as it.Their words
I don't think there is a human analog to pre-training.
+ 2 more
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Their words
The models are much more like the first student but even more because then we say okay so the model should be good at competitive programming so let's get every single competitive programming problem ever and then let's do some data augmentation so we have even more competitive programming problems
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Their words
And one of the one thing you could do, and I think that's something that is done inadvertently, is that people take inspiration from the evals.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Give First: The Power of MentorshipTheir words
Give First is now available to pre-order in Audiobook format
From one piece On contrarian history 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Further, the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘Dark Ages’ and that a term we used for source survival has escaped containment and been rendered meaningless by a bunch of poorly read self-congratulatory dolts is, in fact, what we call ‘settled academic fact’.
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Their words
Because of how source survival works, or indeed, how architectural survival works, we are often encouraged to think of the past as a place populated entirely by the wealthy elite.
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Their words
The Roman Empire, therefore, is actually not necessary for keeping industry going.
+ 1 more
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Their words
There is no such thing as revisionist history. Writing history is a constant process of re-evaluation of sources and attempts to control for the biases of the past as well as our own.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Clearing the AirTheir words
If you want a book that explains the climate challenge without doom or denial, Clearing the Air is a must-read.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Remarkably Bright CreaturesTheir words
I think anyone who enjoys fiction would enjoy this book, but it’s a must-read for people who grew up in Western Washington like I did.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
When Everyone Knows That Everyone KnowsTheir words
If you are interested in learning more about how humans communicate and work together, I highly recommend reading When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.
+ 1 more
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Likedrcmnd.app
Who KnewTheir words
This part of Who Knew is raw and honest in a way most business memoirs usually aren’t.
24 November 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
DropboxTheir words
Yes, I use Dropbox and GitHub to hold all the data that I care about, but the beauty of these systems is that they work with local copies of that data
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Likedrcmnd.app
StarlinkTheir words
If you're stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and you somehow haven't discovered the glory of Starlink, maybe just stick to your old full-disk backup ways.
23 November 2025
From one piece Product Evals in Three Simple Steps 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Human annotators can miss up to half of defects due to fatigue when reviewing large volumes of samples.Their words
And human annotators can miss as many as 50% of the defects due to fatigue after looking at hundreds of samples.
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korrents.com
The main advantage of an LLM evaluator over human annotators is scalability, not higher accuracy.Their words
In my opinion, the true benefit isn't higher accuracy than human annotators-it's scalability.
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Their words
The benchmark is human performance, not perfection. We sometimes get requirements for 90%+ accuracy.
From one piece China bows to de-industrialization 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
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korrents.com
A declining manufacturing share of GDP as an economy matures reflects economic success rather than decline.Their words
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
22 November 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the FutureTheir words
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical LifeTheir words
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025Their words
Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the FutureTheir words
Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
John & Paul: A Love Story in SongsTheir words
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
21 November 2025
From one piece Intel is listening, don't waste your shot 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
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Their words
If you are in regular meetings with a hardware vendor as a customer (or potential customer) you can accomplish a lot by providing firm and tough feedback, particularly with Intel today.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
EnshittificationTheir words
I’ve been a long-time Cory Doctorow fan. His new book Enshittification is delicious.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
TANK® M3 Push SledTheir words
This is, bar none, the best sled I have ever used for pushing or pulling. It isn't cheap, but I use it infinitely more than the cheaper sleds I've bought in the past.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The WayTheir words
Using the app for just 10–20 minutes a day has reduced my anxiety more than I would have thought possible with any app.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Elgato Wave 3Their words
Most impressive to me, it seems to cancel bounce and echo far better than my pro studio gear.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
ManukoraTheir words
I love this smooth and creamy Mānuka honey, and I use it before bed to help with sleep.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowTheir words
Fiction, 416 pages, which go very quickly. #76 on the NYT's list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. This was a new find in 2025.
20 November 2025
From one piece Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
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Their words
We have never, ever done well in international educational comparisons.
18 November 2025
From one piece Will AI Make Us Stupid? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI translation will stop you learning to speak a language, exactly as AI summaries stop you understanding a book.Their words
Similarly, AI translation will prevent you from learning to speak another language, AI summaries will block you from really understanding the arguments laid out in a book, and AI analyses of your personal problems will make it harder for you to think through solutions to your own problems.
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korrents.com
You cannot learn to code by having a model write it: the mental models only come from writing programs by hand.Their words
The answer, I believe, is not too different from before: if you want to learn to code, you need to start by creating programs by hand.
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Their words
Very often, learning skills that are automated in practice is a necessary stepping stone to cultivating uniquely human skills.
+ 2 more
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Their words
Knowledge is dead if it’s not in your head.
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korrents.com
Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.Their words
Learning requires an investment of effort, and AI will make us stupider if that effort is avoided.
From one piece Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Story 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A twist works best when it is discoverable on rewatch rather than achieved by directly misleading the audience.Their words
Instead, the filmmakers directly misled the audience rather than crafting a clever deception discoverable on rewatch.
Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Storynateliason.com
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korrents.com
The effectiveness of a plot twist depends on how carefully a story's point of view relates to its audience.Their words
Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.
Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Storynateliason.com
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The LoserTheir words
You can't go wrong with the short The Loser (trans. by Mark M. Anderson) as an introduction to Thomas Bernhard.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
SulaTheir words
Toni Morrison's brief Sula—rereleased with a new cover this month—is one of her best works and a great starting place for her lush and lyrical style.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Child of GodTheir words
Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is the perfect starter book to see if you enjoy McCarthy's maximalist prose and macabre images before tackling the longer Blood Meridian.
+ 2 more
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Pedro PáramoTheir words
Some excellent short novels that fit this include Juan Rulfo's haunted and brilliant Pedro Páramo
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Metallic RealmsTheir words
A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it "brilliant" (Esquire), "a total blast" (Chicago Tribune), "unrelentingly smart and inventive" (Locus), and "just plain wonderful" (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life?
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Concept2 RowErgTheir words
The Concept2 RowErg is one of the highest quality products I've ever used. Had one for years now, feels like it'll last another 100.
17 November 2025
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korrents.com
Only the US and China have substantial startup activity left; the rest of the world cannot really do startups.Their words
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
From one piece Verifiability 2 beliefs · karpathy.bearblog.dev
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korrents.com
A verifiable task can be optimised by reinforcement learning until a neural network performs it extremely well.Their words
If a task/job is verifiable, then it is optimizable directly or via reinforcement learning, and a neural net can be trained to work extremely well.
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korrents.com
How verifiable a task is now predicts how automatable it is, the way specifiability predicted it in the 1980s.Their words
The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm.
From one piece why i played tennis on book tour 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Having an external accountability partner makes people follow through on writing they would otherwise skip.Their words
Accountability threads work! It brings me no pleasure to say this.
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korrents.com
Men's tennis shots tend to carry more spin and arc than women's, who tend to hit flatter.Their words
Women hit flatter balls. Men on average tend to hit with more shape, more arc, more spin.
16 November 2025
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Their words
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
From one piece How FOSS Won and Why It Matters 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you are going to crash society.
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Their words
Making licenses suddenly commercial for big entities? You are forcing people to go back through the Procurement process. They will shift over time back to a FOSS solution, even if it is less good.
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Their words
You cannot go back. If the solution you offer recreate any of the Supply Chain framework problem, then your solution is Dead On Arrival.
+ 1 more
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Their words
FOSS solve that problem far more than it solves “we don’t want to pay”. Most corporations would be surprised by how cheap it would cost them to pay for the FOSS software they use.
15 November 2025
From one piece The Boring Part of Bell Labs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There is a feeling that a lot of tail-chasing in industrial improvement is due to interactions not being recognized.
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korrents.com
Designed experiments can reveal causal relationships that observational data alone cannot determine.Their words
But even more important than efficiency, designed experiments can inform about causality, which is very difficult to determine from collected observed data.
14 November 2025
12 November 2025
From one piece Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGI 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Coding is a software-factory category that may end up bigger than knowledge work itself.Their words
this fundamentally this category of coding and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest categories right it is a software factory category in fact it may be bigger than knowledge work
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Their words
So this AI thing will be that right. So if you take coding um what we built with GitHub and VS code in over whatever decades uh suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year and so that I think is what's going to happen as well which is the market expands massively.
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korrents.com
What the industrial revolution took 70 to 150 years to deliver, AI may deliver in 20 to 25.Their words
whatever what took 70 years maybe 150 years for the industrial revolution may happen in 20 years 25 years
+ 2 more
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Their words
even if the tech is diffusing fast uh this time around for true economic growth to appear it has to sort of diffuse to a point where the work the work artifact and the workflow has to change and so that's kind of one place where I think uh the change management required for a corporation to truly change I think is something we shouldn't discount
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korrents.com
AI is a tool and not something mystical: plenty of past technologies also took over things only humans had done.Their words
But that has been the case with many technologies in the past. only humans did a lot of things and then we add tools that did them.
From one piece I Canceled My Family's Health Insurance (and joined CrowdHealth) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
People are not obligated to help cover healthcare costs that result from others' lifestyle choices.Their words
But if someone has made poor lifestyle choices, that's not my problem.
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korrents.com
Excluding less healthy members from a health cost-sharing pool makes it cheaper for the remaining healthy members.Their words
And by excluding unhealthy people, they've created a better, cheaper option for healthy people.
11 November 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Letters From an Imaginary CountryTheir words
Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!
From one piece Bed depth: why it matters 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
In coffee brewing, channels that reach the bottom of the coffee bed carry astringency-causing compounds into the cup.Their words
Channels that manage to reach the bottom of a coffee bed carry larger, astringency-causing compounds out of the bed and into the cup.
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Their words
If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.
10 November 2025
9 November 2025
8 November 2025
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korrents.com
Automation is a lie: every automated thing needs a human on top of it making sure it is working.Their words
That's great, but I don't think it can replace a human poking at virtual machines; my experience with EC2 is that images break in all sorts of wild ways, and nothing beats a human for saying "huh, I have no idea what's going on here but something seems weird".
7 November 2025
6 November 2025
5 November 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware WorksTheir words
In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding
4 November 2025
3 November 2025
From one piece Game design is simple, actually 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A game is a machine built around uncertainty.Their words
Games are machines built around uncertainty.
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korrents.com
People learn best when the problem in front of them is just past the edge of what they can already do.Their words
People learn best when the problem they are tackling is right past the edge of what they can do.
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korrents.com
Lavish feedback wrapped around no real problem is shallow entertainment at best and exploitation at worst.Their words
At minimum you’re making shallow entertainment. At worst, you are building exploitative entertainment.
2 November 2025
1 November 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
SiloTheir words
Silo has the aura of a future classic.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Dandelion ChocolateTheir words
Dandelion Chocolate Dandelion Chocolate Don’t mess around.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Piment d’VilleTheir words
Their Piment d’Ville is a pantry staple.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Boonville Barn Collective beansTheir words
The Boonville crew rotates beans through their fields, and we are the beneficiaries.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The Fat Gold Gift SetTheir words
Consumable gifts Fat Gold The Fat Gold Gift Set My work life has two great lobes.
31 October 2025
From one piece NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A Chinese crewed landing on the Moon before America returns would be a defeat for the free world.Their words
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
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korrents.com
After fourteen years of redesign, Orion's heat shield performed worse than the one it replaced.Their words
The updated heat shield design, after more than 14 years of development, had performed even worse.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
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Their words
It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Orion is too heavy for any rocket that exists to carry it to low lunar orbit and bring it home.Their words
Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
From one piece Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
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Their words
And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.
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Their words
Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.
+ 2 more
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Their words
You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
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Their words
I hope it’s got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can’t just have jokes for 40 hours, it won’t work.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Queen DemonTheir words
I do not think this book could really be enjoyed without the previous book, but with it, it's lots of skillfully-written fun, and leaves me eager for more.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Inequality: A Genetic HistoryTheir words
I think a great book could be written on all this. (Among other things, it should be catnip to anyone who wants to call themselves a historical materialist.) This book, however, is merely OK.
30 October 2025
29 October 2025
28 October 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped OffTheir words
Raymond Biesinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound
27 October 2025
26 October 2025
From one piece The Rise of Renewable Energy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
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korrents.com
Renewables now account for the bulk of the growth in electricity generation, whatever their opponents believe.Their words
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
25 October 2025
From one piece A note on tariffs from the real world 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I suspect higher prices make people leave more quickly than lower prices make them come.
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korrents.com
Businesses raise prices only when their accounts force them to, not when they can see the cost coming.Their words
Business only raise prices when accounting losses force them to do so.
24 October 2025
From one piece Tales from Toddlerhood 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Young children learn a new language through immersion far more effectively than adults do.Their words
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
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Their words
Toddler parenthood is a reality distortion zone that makes it hard to remember that most people find your toddler breathtakingly uninteresting.
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Their words
Toddler parents can take solace in the fact that parenting probably matters less than we think it does.
23 October 2025
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Their words
durable workflows are scaling errors as values to your infrastructure. errors as values lead to predictable, maintainable, and scalable software.
22 October 2025
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Their words
An idea I'm trying to hold tighter is that the only way to be useful here is to risk offending people. And perhaps if you're not taking any risk offending people then it's unlikely you're saying something useful.
From one piece ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.
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Their words
Atlas is a browser, but it is not a web browser. It is an anti-web browser.
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korrents.com
A company's quality is bounded by its team's quality, and a team's quality is bounded by its founders.Their words
We believe that a company is only as good as its team, and a team is only as good as its founders.
From one piece You Don't Have to End Homelessness To Make Cities Safer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Read this in the context of Christopher et al., and the reasonable conclusion is that many of the problems associated with homelessness are the result of unsheltered homelessness.
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Their words
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
21 October 2025
From one piece Solving regex crosswords with Z3 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I suspect the pattern generalizes: If Z3 has first-class support for your problem domain, it's worth starting there!
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korrents.com
Augmenting a general-purpose solver with domain-specific heuristics commonly gives it a meaningful performance boost.Their words
My sense is that this hybrid is fairly common in practice; solvers aren't magical and if you can deduce additional structure using domain-specific analysis, it will often give the solver an important boost.
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Their words
If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Fever BeachTheir words
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
20 October 2025
From one piece Beyond the Machine 4 beliefs · frankchimero.com
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Their words
An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing.
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Their words
So while vibe coding may be useful for short-term work, it’s not a suitable approach for anything intended to last longer than a tub of yogurt. Time saved is not strength gained, so I went looking for other examples about how to work with the machine.
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Their words
The fractures fell neatly along disciplines: engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both. In this climate, AI becomes frenemy identification technology, another way to avoid working together.
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Their words
You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.
19 October 2025
From one piece Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have the autonomy to choose what to work on, but there's the expectation of accountability and impact.
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Their words
Being right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.
From one piece Exams are everything in China 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Centralized, hierarchical competitive tournaments are effective at creating strong incentives.Their words
Also, centralized hierarchical tournaments seem to be good at creating very effective incentives.
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korrents.com
A government's political legitimacy depends on providing a fair, merit-based channel for social advancement.Their words
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
18 October 2025
17 October 2025
From one piece Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And it just so turns out that um this was extremely early, way too early. so early that we shouldn't have been working on that, you know, uh because um if you're just stumbling your way around and keyboard mashing and mouse clicking and trying to get rewards in these environments, um your reward is too sparse and you just won't learn and you're going to burn a forest uh computing and you're never actually going to get something off the ground.
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Their words
So like they don't have enough intelligence. They're not multimodal enough. They can't do computer use and all this kind of stuff. And they don't do a lot of things. You know, they don't have continual learning. You can't just tell them something and they'll remember it. And they're just cognitively lacking. And it's just not working. And I just think that it will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.
16 October 2025
From one piece Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A lot of people can match a framework for taste; almost nobody can create one, and creating one is the rare skill.Their words
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
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Their words
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
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Their words
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
+ 2 more
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Their words
I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to speak step into that leadership role
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Their words
if you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Like that's again how you win or lose. Craft matters. And so we're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. It's like good enough is not enough.
14 October 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
AmpTheir words
codex gets me far better results than amp. I have to give them kudos tho for session sharing, they push some interesting ideas ahead.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
CursorTheir words
Cursor… it’s tab completion model is industry leading, if you still write code yourself. I use VS Code mostly, I do like them pushing things like browser automation and plan mode tho.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
GLM 4.6Their words
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Kimi K2.1Their words
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
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Usesrcmnd.app
ccusageTheir words
I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.
From one piece Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
+ 2 more
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Their words
immigration is mathematically irrelevant to the central policy problem of low fertility
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
13 October 2025
From one piece The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Actually Work 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In rodent studies, semaglutide and tirzepatide were both found to increase the rate of thyroid tumors.
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Their words
empirically cortisol promotes fat storage and muscle breakdown, and increases insulin resistance.
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Their words
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
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Their words
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
12 October 2025
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Their words
modern instruments generally have more reliable tone, wider range, and better projection than traditional instruments-they are better as instruments.
First explorations in Indian classical musicandrewbatson.com
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Lovedrcmnd.app
CleanShot XTheir words
This is the best screenshot utility for Macs. You’d think how much can there be in a screenshot utility, and CleanShot X will still color you surprised.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Pixelmator ProTheir words
is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
PhotoshopTheir words
is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
UnreadTheir words
I was using Reeder 5 for the longest time, but since that seems to have been abandoned, I’ve switched to Unread as my RSS app recently.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Raindrop.ioTheir words
One of the best bookmarking services available today.
11 October 2025
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Their words
This is intentional and I believe good AI drivers are experts in their domains and utilize AI as an assistant, not a replacement.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Echoes of OctoberTheir words
I approached Echoes of October with trepidation. A graphic novel about violence and grief isn’t easy terrain. But it succeeds in a haunting, urgent way.
From one piece The AI water issue is fake 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It’s very common that I’m told that data centers poison the water around them.
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korrents.com
A data centre earns its county far more tax revenue per gallon of water than a golf course does.Their words
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
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Their words
So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.
10 October 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Money StuffTheir words
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Odd LotsTheir words
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
From one piece 'As Long as it Takes': What does it mean to commit to Ukraine's security? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The 'coalition of the willing' for Ukraine is not a security guarantee and should stop being described as one.Their words
In all of this what may have been missed is that the plan now connected with a coalition of the willing is not a security guarantee.
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korrents.com
What makes a security guarantee credible is an alliance that is active in peacetime, not the wording of the treaty.Their words
It works because it is an active alliance, and not left dormant until an emergency arises.
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Their words
Despite its lack of automaticity this remains the gold standard for security guarantees.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
NATO enlargement was driven by the demand of the countries that wanted in, not by an alliance pushing east.Their words
Enlargement was demand and not supply led.
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korrents.com
The West is not doing Ukraine a favour by helping it resist Russia; Ukraine is doing the West a favour.Their words
The West is not doing Ukraine a favour by helping it resist aggression; it is Ukraine doing the West a favour.
From one piece Data centers & electricity - part 1: as of 2025 they haven't raised national prices 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The American states with the fastest electricity load growth saw prices fall rather than rise.Their words
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
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inflationdata centersenergyAmerica
Their words
This is the first conclusion of my deep dive: Data centers have (so far) not affected national average household electricity bills.
9 October 2025
8 October 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
LightburnTheir words
Lightburn is my favorite way to control a laser cutter.
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Likedrcmnd.app
BitwardenTheir words
Bitwarden is a well crafted password manager, and it's very cheap.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Nisus Writer ProTheir words
Nisus Writer Pro is a delightful word processor for the Mac. Not distracting or showy, it simply works great.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
GitKrakenTheir words
My favorite software for Git version control.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Asus ROG Strix XG49VQTheir words
Main monitor on my desk. Huge screen real estate for multitasking.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Apple AirPods MaxTheir words
Amazing sound quality and noise cancellation.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Windows TerminalTheir words
Modern terminal for Windows with tabs, split panes, and customization.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Elgato Stream Deck+Their words
Used for streaming and daily automation tasks.
7 October 2025
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Their words
In some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.
6 October 2025
5 October 2025
From one piece Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't want to bother someone, you just don't ask the question, right? And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked.
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Their words
And if I'm starting to see like more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay, we might have kind of tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like there might not be as much juice to squeeze.
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Their words
I mean in my experience the typical win rate and I hate to use that term for experiments is is often something like 30 to 50%. Like usually you're not actually get like you're trying a bunch of things a lot of hypotheses turn out not to be true. you know, consumer products are very unpredictable like that.
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Their words
When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your like horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head. And so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves. And we have coach say something encouraging. You know, losing just part of learning like keep it up, that type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%
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Their words
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
4 October 2025
3 October 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000Their words
And I love the podcast of the book’s authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000”
1 October 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
LangsmithTheir words
The overall workflow is intuitive, especially for those new to formal evaluation processes. The UI guides you through creating datasets, running experiments, and annotating results.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
BraintrustTheir words
The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Arize PhoenixTheir words
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
+ 1 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Jupyter notebooksTheir words
As for me personally, I tend to use these tools as a backend data store and use Jupyter notebooks as well as my own custom built annotation interfaces for most of my needs.
30 September 2025
From one piece Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And you're supposed to be really connected, but the conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are.
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korrents.com
A phone is not a necessary device; set your own agenda and the phone only gets in the way.Their words
I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.
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Their words
So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.
+ 2 more
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Their words
So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
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Their words
Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.
From one piece Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
it seems like struggle is a part of life, either you do it earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development
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korrents.com
Arresting Pavel Durov was a historic wrong and a gigantic PR mistake that will keep founders from building in France.Their words
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
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Their words
One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Action comes before motivation: you do first and feel afterwards, not the other way round.Their words
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
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Their words
This is a short (~150 pp), brisk first book on the topic for physicists. Most of the book --- the first ten chapters --- are good introduction to common models of spin glasses.
29 September 2025
28 September 2025
From one piece There Are No Miracles in Education 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
That makes perfect sense when you consider that schools control 10% or less of the variance in student academic outputs.
There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com
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korrents.com
Who is in a school predicts its results better than anything about its teaching, its teachers or its methods.Their words
Once again, the composition of the student body is always more powerful a predictor than any identifiable pedagogical, school, or teacher variable.
There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com
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Their words
That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.
There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com
27 September 2025
26 September 2025
From one piece Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The scalable method is you learn from experience. Um you uh you you try things, you see what you see what works. No one no one has to tell you. First of all, you have a goal. So without a goal, uh there's no sense of right or wrong or better or worse. So large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That's just, you know, it's exactly starting in the wrong place.
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Their words
For me, having a goal is the essence of intelligence
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Their words
So there's no ground truth. You can't have prior knowledge if you don't have ground truth because the prior knowledge is supposed to be a hint or an initial belief about what the truth is.
+ 2 more
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Their words
they have the ability to predict what a person would say they don't have the ability to predict what will happen
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Their words
reinforcement learning is about understanding your world whereas large language models are about mimicking people doing what people say you should do. They're not about figuring out what to do.
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korrents.com
Almost every major figure in AI has now arrived at the critique of large language models he began making in 2019.Their words
But one by one, almost every major thinker in AI has come around to the critique of LLMs that I began presenting in 2019.
25 September 2025
From one piece Some Recent Stuff I Wrote 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
applying AI to cyberdefense will help us defend against AI that is leveraged for cyberoffense.
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Their words
the perspective I outline is very bullish on AI capabilities and very concerned about the risks which may arise by default, but also hopeful that, through foresight and vigorous action, we can mitigate the worst of these risks.
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Their words
Companies and countries are tempted to cut corners by default and would benefit from some rules of the road, at least if they're sure others will follow those rules.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Being Right or Making MoneyTheir words
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Art of the MarketTheir words
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Triumph of the OptimistsTheir words
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrowTheir words
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Silver BearsTheir words
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
24 September 2025
23 September 2025
22 September 2025
21 September 2025
From one piece From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
but if I was, you know, at the zero or 10th percentile, it can certainly get me even today very quickly up to like the 60th 70th in terms of um what the state of the art is.
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Their words
And so the main thing that I felt so excited about and this is something I tell my team all the time is we need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles.
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korrents.com
If you cannot say crisply what success looks like, you will not get great work — out of a team or out of an AI.Their words
if you're really unclear about what success looks like the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. Um I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.
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Their words
And you have to understand the strengths of of you know used to be people but now it's basically models and different models have different strengths. So it's like they have different personalities
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Their words
management is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. You have a vision and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done.
20 September 2025
19 September 2025
From one piece Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
His officers didn't think so. High command said, “No, we're not going to attack the West; we're going to lose.” And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany.
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Their words
That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.
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Their words
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.
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Their words
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
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Their words
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
18 September 2025
From one piece ACQ2: How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke) 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I I think this is golden age of humanity right now. It's the I think it's the end of the beginning. And and so I think we will um I think people in 1,000 years will um study these times uh the way we are studying um Cicero's times of the end of the Roman Republic
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Their words
And you know what no sci-fi author dared to predict is that the Turing tests just passes by.
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korrents.com
An abstraction chosen wrongly at the start means a team can never make its software great, however good that team is.Their words
Just imagine you use very bad software and um the team that started the project decided early to use Xamarin and then they never had a chance of making this as good as all the other things you really appreciate on your phone due to this decision no matter how good they are.
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Their words
what you are try like trying to do as a tool maker, as an infrastructure builder, um as a product maker is you want to make a uh tool that brings the floor up significantly, but doesn't constrain the ceiling. And that is extremely hard.
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Their words
You don't even need to predict the future that well. If you just live in everyone else's relative future, which really is just a couple of um high conviction high courage uh update to beta clicks. It's not that hard to live in the future.
From one piece Climate turning point 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Trust in institutions has fallen because the institutions have been repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.Their words
Well, when the institutions are over and over spectacularly wrong, whether just incompetent, politicized, or mendacious, there is a reason for loss of trust.
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Their words
The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science.
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Their words
climate change though real is not the civilization-threatening disaster pitched at Davos, Paris, and the media, that hugely expensive climate policies do no good
17 September 2025
16 September 2025
15 September 2025
14 September 2025
13 September 2025
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korrents.com
Nine tenths of the cost of Mars Sample Return comes from a single planetary-protection requirement.Their words
something like 90% of the complexity and cost of MSR is driven by a requirement that the samples “break the chain” on the way home
12 September 2025
From one piece Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And I think we'll see the same thing with automation where uh basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. Uh and and that just like makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped because when it's robot plus human, now there's a lot more potential for the robot to like actually learn on the job, acquire new skills.
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Their words
So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.
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Their words
Like if you answer a question, you just like answered it wrong. It's like well it's not like you can just like go back and like tweak a few things like the person you told the answer to might not even know that it's wrong. Whereas if you're like folding the t-shirt and you messed up a little bit like it's pretty obvious like you can reflect on that, figure out what happened and do it better next time.
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Their words
Uh but it uh I think we kind of like know like roughly the puzzle pieces and it's something that we need to work on and I think if we work on it and we're a bit lucky and everything kind of goes as planned I think single digit is reasonable.
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korrents.com
The date that matters for robotics is not when the technology is finished but when the data flywheel starts turning.Their words
So to me like what what I tend to think about a lot in terms of timelines is not the date when it will be done but the date when it will when like the flywheel starts basically.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI FutureTheir words
is spectacular and a must-read for every non-technologist about how to think about this “AI thing.”
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
AI & ITheir words
If you want the short version, the recent AI & I podcast with Reid is an excellent way to get a feel for it.
11 September 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone DiesTheir words
Despite my gripes above, this is an impressive book.
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Their words
I don't say this lightly, but I feel like indie games right now are the best they've ever been, and I want to live up to that new standard with my own work.
10 September 2025
From one piece 2025 State of the Union Address by President von der Leyen, 10 September 2025 3 beliefs · enlargement.ec.europa.eu
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Their words
This is Russia's war. And it is Russia that should pay. This is why we need to work urgently on a new solution to finance Ukraine's war effort on the basis of the immobilised Russian assets. With the cash balances associated to these Russian assets, we can provide Ukraine with a Reparations Loan.
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korrents.com
A new world order based on raw power is being drawn right now, and Europe has to fight for its place in it.Their words
Battlelines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now. So, yes, Europe must fight. For its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.
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Their words
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
9 September 2025
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Their words
With Web forms, the burden is on people to adapt to databases. Today's AI models, however, can flip this requirement. That is, they allow people to provide information in whatever form they like and use AI do the work necessary to put that information into the right structure for a database.
8 September 2025
From one piece Thoughts on the Conviction of Donna Adelson 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
We live in a culture that preaches self‑esteem more than self‑knowledge. That leaves people morally flabby-performing virtue while outsourcing the actual discipline that keeps ordinary humans from doing monstrous things.
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Their words
People who insist they're harmless aren't safe; they're naive. People who know exactly how dangerous they could become-and fear it-are the ones who deliberately yoke that force to good aims.
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Their words
We are all - each and every one of us - capable of great evil, and we are far better of is we recognize it.
7 September 2025
6 September 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
RaycastTheir words
I use Raycast as my launcher.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
FreeAgentTheir words
I use FreeAgent for sending invoices and handling bookkeeping. I've been using it for over five years at this point and I don't know what I'd do without it.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Starling BankTheir words
Starling Bank is one of the big challenger banks here in the UK. The app is easy-to-use, and it automatically syncs my transactions into FreeAgent.
+ 2 more
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Likedrcmnd.app
WiseTheir words
I use Wise for sending & receiving money internationally. They have really low rates compared to the rest of the market.
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Usesrcmnd.app
ZSA Voyager keyboardTheir words
ZSA Voyager keyboard
4 September 2025
From one piece Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park | Lex Fridman Podcast #480 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So, giant eyeballs, they can either see very well, they can see a very long way in daylight, or they can see very well at night. And my suspicion is it's the latter. I think they're probably primarily nocturnal when they get that size.
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Their words
So, I think it's just straight fiction. It works for the book and it works for the movie, but it's... as far as I can tell, it's straight fiction, and Crichton just made it up. If it's buried in some bit of literature, he's done better finding it than I have, and I've had a really good look, and I know how to look.
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Their words
But this is the absolute rule of thumb for how foraging and growth and predation operate across everything from fish to starfish, praying mantises, all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles. It's how it works. So it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs. And then, as I say, we've actually got the direct evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents. They're taking small stuff.
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Their words
These are weird and rare outcomes. These don't usually happen. The vast majority of active predation is on stuff much, much, much smaller than you.
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korrents.com
T. rex is a genuine ecological oddity: nothing else in its ecosystem came anywhere near its size as a carnivore.Their words
But fundamentally, T-Rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it, because it is by far, ludicrously by far, the largest carnivore in its ecosystem.
From one piece Why sync 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Local-first sync architectures are a natural fit for AI agents, since both are inherently multiplayer.Their words
Agentic and sync are natural complements because local-first is multiplayer by default, and agents are another sort of "player" in addition to human collaborators.
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Their words
The baseline of user expectation quality and craft keeps rising.
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Their words, before
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
3 September 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Waste BooksTheir words
Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.
2 September 2025
From one piece Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
film was this high margin product where they had a bunch of unique intellectual property and digital cameras are a low margin um commodity where they were competing with the entire consumer electronics industry with no differentiation.
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Their words
I think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.
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korrents.com
Incumbents have looked unbeatable at the start of every previous platform shift and have still lost.Their words
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
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korrents.com
Being certain a technology matters tells you almost nothing about where its value will end up being captured.Their words
It wasn't clear that the browser wasn't where the value capture was cuz Microsoft crowbarred its way into dominance in browsers but that turned out not to matter and then all the value is in search advertising and social which were 5 years later and 10 years later and so like you can be very very clear that this is the thing and then still be completely unclear how it's going to work.
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Their words
My sort of base case is to say this is kind of another platform shift and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next 10 or 15 years and then there'll be something else and so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts
1 September 2025
From one piece One Size Does Not Fit All 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A major new interface redesign takes roughly a year of refinement before it looks presentable.Their words
Liquid Glass is currently in a barely presentable state on iOS. It's going to be like iOS 7 and take another year to sand down the rough edges.
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korrents.com
A single interface design should not be applied uniformly across phone, tablet, watch, TV, and desktop.Their words
The bottom line is that one size does not fit all: we don't want a Mac that looks or works like a phone, tablet, watch, or TV.
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korrents.com
Tablets will not replace desktop computers for complex, resource-intensive professional work.Their words
So while iPadOS has obviously gotten more capable, I don't see it displacing the Mac desktop as the place where the heavy lifting gets done.
From one piece Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.Their words
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
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Their words
While the same does not directly apply in other fields, working with others to produce the best results for everyone will be much better in the long-term than focusing solely on what Amazon needs right now.
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korrents.com
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.Their words
Customer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".
30 August 2025
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korrents.com
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.Their words, before
Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Their words now
So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
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Their words
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com
29 August 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismTheir words
As Quinn Slobodian documents in his excellent book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
28 August 2025
From one piece Chat is: the Future or a Terrible UI 2 beliefs · lukew.com
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Their words
Language is a terrible way to describe visual, spatial, and temporal things.
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Their words
It's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing.
27 August 2025
From one piece Megapapers and How to Write Them 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.
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korrents.com
AI is becoming capable of synthesizing knowledge, one of the core functions megapapers serve.Their words
AI is increasingly adept at directly achieving some goals that megapapers help to achieve, such as synthesizing knowledge.
From one piece How to survive a TikTok hit song 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's very relatable; the internet is so toxic but we kind of have no choice but to interact with it if we want to be heard as musicians / writers / artists / citizens.
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Their words
The band told me about the pressure of creating content in order to promote their music and the ways in which the audience now has power over how songs sound.
26 August 2025
25 August 2025
From one piece My Current AI Dev Workflow 3 beliefs · steipete.me
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Their words
Still don’t see how this could be moved to background agents. I steer the models a lot as I notice them drifting off - that’s much harder if they run in the background.
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Their words
Bigger changes always get tests. Automated ones usually aren’t great, but the model almost always finds issues when you ask it to write tests IN THE SAME CONTEXT. Context is precious, don’t waste it.
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Their words
Even removed my last MCP, since Claude sometimes would go off spinning up Playwright unasked when it could simply read the code - which is faster and pollutes the context less.
23 August 2025
22 August 2025
From one piece The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Likewise, self-diagnosis should be understood as an attempt to secure the therapeutic effect of a medical intervention to which patients do not have official access.
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korrents.com
Diagnoses that have therapeutic effects are medical interventions and should be treated and researched as such.Their words
If a clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect, then, at least in some instances, diagnoses are medical interventions in themselves and ought to be treated and researched as such, with an eye to both positive effects and potential iatrogenic harms.
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korrents.com
Clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect independent of any other intervention.Their words
Their experiences highlight a striking, neglected and unchristened medical phenomenon: The therapeutic effect of a clinical diagnosis, independent of any other intervention, where clinical diagnosis refers to situating the person's experiences into a clinical category by a clinician or the patient.
21 August 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The WeightTheir words
The Weight is Mellia Mendes's award-winning webcomic, now collected in a massive, beautifully made graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly. It will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out.
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Their words
Years of reform mean that almost everyone who can be diverted from Rikers already is.
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Their words, before
I suspect that if you decided to be open-minded, then the Being would probably be extremely persuasive. But I don’t think it’s very common to do that.
Their words now
I take it back. Instead of being unsure, I now lean strongly towards the idea that the Being would in fact be very good at convincing people of stuff, and far better than any human.
20 August 2025
From one piece Labubus and the brainrot aesthetic 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.
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Their words
I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we're kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment
19 August 2025
From one piece MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.
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Their words
I'm more agnostic about the best techniques, things like sparse autoencoders are a useful tool, but easy to waste effort using when a simpler method is sufficient or better - start by doing the obvious thing!
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Their words
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
18 August 2025
From one piece How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2] 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
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Their words
I just think about like really simple things like access to mental health care, access to education, access to medical advice, access to legal advice. We're essentially taking expertise and making it a commodity. And I think that will is generally democratizing.
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Their words
if you tell what what jobs are most likely to be automated with the current generation of technology, you would probably put software engineering right at the top. The people building this technology or building the technology that is disrupting their own profession.
+ 2 more
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Their words
If you look at the S&P 500 now and you look at the amount of value from companies created in that, one could argue that actually almost all of the exuberance and hype was totally warranted and it in fact did change commerce in fundamental ways.
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Their words
So when you make something like chat GPT, you can go from to zero to 100 million users faster than any technology in history because of the other technologies though. like you couldn't have gotten there if not for the build out of the internet, if not for the smartphone.
From one piece How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2] 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Neither seats nor tokens can price an agent, because neither of them measures whether the job got done.Their words
Seat based. Well, what is a seat? That doesn't make any sense. Consumption where it's like is it per message? Is it per token? Is it per conversation? And none of these things actually mapped very well to getting a job done and getting a job done well.
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Their words
And in contrast to software as a service or software you'd buy off a shelf at, you know, Fry Electronics, you know, decades ago, which might help you be marginally more productive, help you get a job done. Agents, in contrast, are actually getting the job done for you. And so you're in essence hiring software to accomplish a task and get it done well.
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Their words
And it came back and half of them were great, a quarter of them were total garbage and a quarter needed some work. But like it was, you know, in a way him working the entire weekend with, you know, guidance from him.
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korrents.com
AI agents can already resolve more than eighty per cent of a company's incoming customer issues.Their words
One of the first was we had a bet as to what percent of kind of all incoming customer issues one of our agents could resolve. And Brett was maybe the pessimist and realist favorably charitably. And I bet we'd exceed 80% by the end of the year and we did.
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Their words
Brett and I like betting and one of the bets we have is the year in which greater than 50% of conversations with agents built on Sierra are with people's personal agents. So agents talking to agents.
17 August 2025
15 August 2025
14 August 2025
13 August 2025
From one piece Open Banking and payments competition 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Letting banks ruin the economics of businesses they dislike by demand letter will inevitably be abused.Their words
We should not allow banks to get into the habit of sending demand letters to ruin the economics of businesses they simply do not like.
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Their words
But cards are not and cannot be the last word in payments.
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korrents.com
Having banked almost everyone does not entitle banks to a fee on every transaction in society.Their words
We have made enormous strides, both from the financial industry and civil society, in banking almost everyone.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Almost all discussions of it center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
From one piece Keyu Jin: China's Economy, Tariffs, Trade, Trump, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #477 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
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Their words
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
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Their words
I say now that China’s biggest challenge is consumption, it’s not production. We know that China’s very, very competitive in production and supply. China needs to be a consuming country to be a rich country.
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Their words
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
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Their words
The biggest misunderstanding is somehow that a group of people or even just one person runs the entire Chinese economy. It is far from the reality. It is a very complex, large economy, and even if there is an extreme form of political centralization, the economy is totally decentralized.
11 August 2025
9 August 2025
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Their words
One of my favorite papers about prompt injection is Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections
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Likedrcmnd.app
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi GermanyTheir words
However, after reading a few pages my original inhibitions were overturned and I bought the book.
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Their words
People had grown to expect miracles, but GPT-5 is just the latest incremental advance.
8 August 2025
7 August 2025
6 August 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
Arc BrowserTheir words
Arc Browser: I tried Kagi but too many apps are incompatible with Safari so RIP. set to default.
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Likedrcmnd.app
BeeperTheir words
the super messaging app. https://www.beeper.com/download (i know founder)
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
podmanTheir words
podman instead of docker https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137525
5 August 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Concept of RepresentationTheir words
But they are in part supported by one of the great books of modern political theory, Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation
4 August 2025
3 August 2025
From one piece Introducing Better Futures 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.
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Their words
I see this as the strongest argument against the better futures perspective, and the reason why I don’t feel confident that work on Flourishing is higher-priority than work on Surviving, rather than merely in the same ballpark.
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korrents.com
A common-sense utopia is much closer to the present day than it is to the best futures actually available to us.Their words
But the difference in value between the world today and that common-sense utopia might be very small compared to the difference between that common-sense utopia and the best futures we could feasibly achieve.
+ 2 more
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Their words
On this view, it’s not enough to avoid near-term catastrophe, because the future could still fall far short of what’s possible.
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Their words
This essay series will argue that work on Flourishing is in the same ballpark of priority as work on Surviving.
2 August 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Close to the MachineTheir words
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s
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Usesrcmnd.app
OpalTheir words
I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.
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Usesrcmnd.app
MochiTheir words
I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
When Harry Met SallyTheir words
On the other hand, seeing When Harry Met Sally at the Roxie was a total delight. I was grinning for probably 80% of it.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
MaterialistsTheir words
I assumed Celine Song's Materialists would be as inoffensively cute as Past Lives, but it was even emptier than I expected.
From one piece AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cure 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
From one piece What does AI progress mean for medical progress? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Yet the production methods still can’t make them below $10 per gram, so they’re still not cheap enough for some “obvious” applications like preventing kids getting malaria in a rainy season.
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Going all in on AI is not the highest return-on-investment strategy if you care about human flourishing, even if AI might lead to rapid scientific advances.
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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korrents.com
Not every bottleneck on medical progress is one AI can remove, and which ones will remain can be guessed at now.Their words
But I don’t think all bottlenecks on medical progress are equally AI-able in the next decade, and I don’t think all will become irrelevant.
What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too.
What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Those are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
31 July 2025
From one piece Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
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Their words
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
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korrents.com
Genghis Khan conquered the largest empire in history with an army that never exceeded about 110,000 men.Their words
Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small.
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Their words
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
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Their words
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Demon DaughterTheir words
Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Penric and the BanditTheir words
Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer.
30 July 2025
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Their words, before
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
Their words now
It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
29 July 2025
From one piece Indonesia Climbs the Chain 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Pollution is a price worth paying for escaping poverty only if the people breathing it are the ones who escape.Their words
It’s one thing if residents of Sulawesi like Mr. Jamal and his family have had to risk exposure to toxic pollutants in a successful escape from poverty. It’s another thing entirely if those bearing most of the burden see few of the benefits.
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Their words
Morowali’s poverty rate has seen a modest decline since 2016, from around 15% to 12%, but this puts it squarely in the middle of the pack of other Sulawesi districts—and not far from the decline in the national average, which fell from 10.9% to 8.6% over the same period.
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Their words
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
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korrents.com
Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.Their words
But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.
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Their words
In our world, we know of no escape from poverty other than climbing the value chain.
28 July 2025
27 July 2025
25 July 2025
24 July 2025
23 July 2025
From one piece Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games | Lex Fridman Podcast #475 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.
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Their words
I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it's not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what's going on, I don't think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way
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Their words
I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Information is the most fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy or matter.Their words
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
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Their words
And I think the reason that's possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that's true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
22 July 2025
20 July 2025
19 July 2025
17 July 2025
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korrents.com
Human adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal world modelsTheir words
We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction.
16 July 2025
15 July 2025
14 July 2025
13 July 2025
11 July 2025
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3 July 2025
2 July 2025
1 July 2025
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Nothing matches.
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